Vengeance Trail

by James Axler

  Red Wolf was a strong man all the way through. He staggered back only two steps, doubling over, grabbing at his ruined midsection. He raised his head for the charge from the second barrel to shatter his face like a clay shitpot. He measured his length backward on the sandstone, arms outflung, the last reflex spasms of his heart pumping out great gushes of blood that was black in the firelight and steamed like lava.

  Chato became aware that he had screamed. Thankfully no one had heard him. No one was hearing anything at all but a loud ringing and echoes of the enormous roars.

  Len Hogan allowed his Izhmash scattergun to tip forward from where recoil had sent it pointing toward the low ceiling. Smoke seeped from the muzzle, and then from the breech as he cracked it open to eject two red plastic-hulled empties and feed in a couple more from a pocket of his colors, the grime-blackened sleeveless denim jacket he wore as a vest.

  Shave-headed, taller even than Red Wolf had been even before partial decapitation, and as lean as a gallows pole with an incisor missing from a mostly lipless mouth framed by a black handlebar mustache, he had been thrown out of the Satan’s Slaves biker gang for unpredictable violence and brutality. Actually, his erstwhile buds had been intent on lynching him, but he proved to be better than they were at tracking.

  He was one of the cooler heads on Chato’s executive council.

  “Enough of that owl-screech shit.” The ringing had subsided enough for Chato to hear him speak. He snapped the shotgun action closed with the flick of a massive wrist enclosed in a studded leather bracer. The rest of the group was busy surreptitiously trying to sidle even farther away from him than they’d been sitting before. Owing to certain peculiar rituals of the northwest bike gangs, the giant coldheart smelled like a chop-shop shitter with backed-up plumbing. “Who, your ass. Talk don’t load no mags.”

  Chato made himself relax. At least a little. Otherwise he was going to lose it here and now, and that would put him in a world of hurt. Hogan had not, he knew, killed Red Wolf, because Red Wolf was stirring up rebellion against Chato. Hogan did it because he liked to kill people, and this was the first handy excuse he’d been presented for some time.

  And that, in a spent casing, was pretty much the problem staring him in the face.

  A White Mountain Apache by birth and upbringing, Chato was in many ways an actual genius. For example, taking best advantage of the coldhearts’ natural propensities for speed and sneakiness, he’d crafted the scouting system that had passed the word of the caravan’s capture back to headquarters, by means of a relay of flashing mirrors, within hours of it going down.

  He could talk a snake into paying in advance for a year’s tap dancing lessons. He was a triple-wizard organizer. He could spin grand schemes all day long, and all night, too, if the Taos Lightning held out.

  And there, unfortunately, his military ability screeched to a brake-burning halt. Right on the edge of the Big Ditch.

  He was first off a coward. It wasn’t just physical cowardice, but really physical cowardice, physiological reactions to threat over which he had utterly no control. The very prospect of physical danger would induce a terrible quaking that started in his belly and moved outward till the shaking threatened to jar loose one molecule from another. An immediate threat simply launched him in uncontrolled flight, assisted by explosive voiding of the bowels.

  Red Wolf’s fury had already set Chato to shaking. It was only a stroke of bastard luck that Hogan chilled him before his threat-level reached Chato’s voiding stage.

  That was manageable. Lots of great war leaders have been more than a little nervous in the service.

  The other problem was more serious. He had no clue how to actually fight.

  All his life, it seemed, he had been adept at talking his way out of trouble. As an orphaned runt, small even by Apache standards, he’d had ample opportunity to acquire the gift growing up. When exiled by vengeful tribal fellows on totally false charges of witchcraft, and totally true charges of misappropriation of tribal resources, he had stumbled into the midst of a band of mostly white-eyes coldhearts whose natural first impulse was to kill him in some picturesque and protracted way and he would let his well-tried tongue spin its silver web just to have something to do.

  Unfortunately, sometimes that tongue moved faster than his brain. He talked himself into positions not even his cunning and insight could then see any way out of.

  So it was with that fast-talk extravaganza out beneath a swollen desert moon. Not only had the outlaws spared him. They had become the nucleus of a whole coldheart army. Bad men had flocked to him, until he had a force of between one and two hundred of the best of worst of the region’s outlaws: the scum de la scum. Men so bad even average, everyday coldhearts had got a bellyful of them.

  And he had no clue what to do with them.

  The approach of the caravan had been a godsend. As Red Wolf complained, Chato had been reluctant to allow his men to attack any of the villes in the surrounding area, nor even try to pick off any isolated ranches. He did know enough to understand a very little of that would raise the country against them, but his more immediate motivation had been simple fear. Leave aside the fact he had no remote intention of exposing his own hide to puncturing by irate sec men or sharpshooting ranchers. What if something went wrong? He was operating on zero tolerance here. One serious setback and all the smoke he’d spun would evaporate and all his mirrors would shatter—and his boys were just the ones to know how to give him a proper send-off with the sharp-edged shards.

  It was a classic politician’s cleft stick. He couldn’t afford to fail, but he couldn’t afford to put off action much longer. So the word his intelligence system brought him of a caravan moving through his territory came as a godsend. Even the report that they’d hooked up with a half-dozen hard-core fighters to enhance their security didn’t bother him unduly, once he’d got a description of those “fighters.” Their leader was a one-eyed mystery man who, granted, anybody in the whole Deathlands above the age of three would make for a stone chiller and no mistake. But the others: an albino boy, a sawed-off runt with glasses, a gaunt old crazie who carried a cane and a couple of bitches. What could they bring to the dance?

  So the caravan looked like easy pickings. And because the travelers simply couldn’t afford to carry much that wasn’t extremely valuable, it was rich—relatively. Split among a hundred and a half marauders, though, with the subchiefs naturally taking extra-large bites of the pie, it wouldn’t seem rich for long. Chato, however, hadn’t thought past that point, not because he lacked the mental ability, but because he didn’t dare. Something would come up. Or else.

  Unfortunately the train had been such easy pickings that a bunch of damned paramilitary interlopers had gone right ahead and picked them. And “or else” had arrived ahead of schedule.

  “So now,” said the dapper outlaw, perhaps the most feared of all, known only as El Abogado, in the mildest of tones, “what do we do? Like any creature, we must feed.”

  Trust a coldheart named El Abogado never to lose sight of the son of a bitching bottom line, Chato thought bitterly.

  There was only one thing to do.

  Chato sucked down a deep breath. By a miracle, he managed not to choke on the smoke.

  “I have a plan…” he said.

  “WHOA!” J.B. EXCLAIMED, grabbing at his fedora to hold it clamped firmly on his head as the splintery wood floor of the wag whacked him hard in the tailbone and bounced him a good four inches in the air. The wag was jolting along at a good fifty clicks an hour—or not so good, on a road that wasn’t much more than a couple tire tracks in the hardpan, already starting to deepen and widen into arroyos from the erosive force of infrequent but fierce rains. Way too fast for the suspension, one way or another.

  Almost all the chosen from the wag caravan had been herded together in the coldhearts’ stakebed wag, including three of the captive companions. Doc was riding in the cab of the lead wag, second in line behind a Baja-buggy scout with its o
wn rollbar-mounted machine gun, squeezed between the captain and his driver. It couldn’t have been too comfortable for him, all crammed up against that unyielding body armor, even leaving aside the company, J.B. reckoned.

  At the outset the pair of guards keeping watch on the prisoners in the bigger wag had ordered them to keep their heads bowed and their fingers interlaced behind their necks. That hadn’t lasted. Even free to grab on to what handholds the wag offered and one another when it didn’t it was all the prisoners could do from getting tossed in a big snake-mating-ball of butts and elbows. Their captors, while coldhearted enough, were more than just coldhearts, it was painfully apparent. They were sec men, probably calling themselves soldiers, from the way they dressed in odds and ends of uniforms and gave one another salutes and titles, military-fashion.

  And if there was one thing sec men hated it was disorder. It made their jobs harder. So the order about clasping hands went by the dusty way.

  The captives rode mostly in shocky silence. Overhead, the glorious blue that had so fatally intoxicated them was being blotted as clouds came racing in, lead-gray. The Armorer saw Mildred looking up at them. To her, their speed was unnatural and still alarming for all the time she’d spent unfrozen and in the present day. To the others, it was the fact that the sky had been almost clear that was disconcerting.

  The late Hizzoner’s bodyguards, Amos and Bub, had left women behind, bleeding out in the dust. Lanky rawboned Bub had two kids, a boy and a girl, who now had flies crawling on their eyeballs. He was blubbering about it with his huge slab of ham hands covering his face. At least J.B. reckoned he was mourning his woman and children. It stood to reason not even a would-be sec man would be wasting tears on the once and never mayor of New Tulsa.

  Stacked right next to J.B., Bub, the burlier and relatively smarter half of the team, was glaring at the companions with little pig eyes which, if bloodshot, were as dry as the goat track beneath them.

  “That bastard Kurtiz was right about one thing,” he said in a voice like a rusty old oil drum rolling down a rocky slope. “You nuke-suckers weren’t shit when it came to being guards.”

  Jak, sitting on the Armorer’s left, stiffened and snarled. J.B. touched him lightly on the arm.

  “You got one thing right, friend,” J.B. said. “We aren’t shit.”

  “Don’t crack wise with me, you sawed-off little—”

  The first two fingers of J.B.’s right hand lashed out and snapped the backs of the tips against Bub’s blond-stubbled jowl, as quick as a diamondback strike. They did no damage, but stung. Bub shook his head once and blinked, totally off balance.

  Which meant that when J.B. brought his left hand whipping around in a hooking palm-heel strike that mashed Bub’s already generally shapeless nose across his face, the blow slammed the back of the goon’s skull into one of the heavy uprights rising from the periphery of the truckbed. Bub’s moaning subsided, he clutched his face as blood trickled between his fingers and down his spine. It began to diffuse in thin, red spiderweb nets through the sweat coating his thick neck.

  “Hey!” the younger of the two guards yelled from the rear of the truck. “Hey! Stop that! I’m warning you!”

  He raised his M-16. J.B. smiled placatingly and held up his hands, palms forward, to show that he was unarmed and innocent of ill intent. The other guard, older and obviously case-hardened, just rolled his eyes and gave the Armorer a tough look.

  “Man’s got a point,” Mildred said bitterly. She sat across from J.B. with her knees up and her arms around them. “Some defenders we turned out to be.”

  “No talking!” the young guard exclaimed, jabbing the air with his weapon.

  J.B. ignored him. Notwithstanding the initial fuckup about ordering the prisoners to keep hands behind heads, the raiders had obviously run this drill before. As if to emphasize the fact, the older guard was toting a 12-gauge Browning A-5 autoloading shotgun sawed-off to the gas check, a pretty serious crowd-control implement. If the prisoners got seriously frisky, and particularly if they showed signs of trying to make a break for it, the guards were ready, willing and able to commence some serious blasting.

  But it was also obvious the raiders needed bodies and they needed lots of them—warm, fully functional, and not leaking from extra orifices. So the captives enjoyed a certain amount of leeway.

  “We just got caught flat, Millie,” J.B. said. “The wind, the sun, the bright blue sky—we got loose and careless, and now here we are.”

  “Be quiet!” the younger guard shrilled, flourishing his longblaster wildly. “I told you! I’ll shoot! I will!”

  “Cody,” the older man growled, “knock off that shit before I lay this mare’s leg up alongside your empty damn head, won’t you? Who gives a rat’s red ass if the bastards talk?”

  Cody sank into sullen silence. The older man held on to the upright at the front-right corner of the bed with his left hand. The other held his sawed-off across his drawn-up knees. He stared back at the captives from a face as hard and flat as a cast iron pan.

  Mildred’s eyes caught J.B.’s. He tried to give her a reassuring smile, but he realized it just looked like somebody was turning a nut at the back of his head and tightening the skin around his mouth. He knew he couldn’t piss down her leg and tell her it was raining—her of all people. But she and he were paired, and he felt he owed it to at least try to do what he could to keep her spirits up.

  He thought of Ryan and had to look away. He took off his glasses and polished them with a handkerchief he removed very gingerly from his pocket. After a few moments he put the specs back on and faced the black woman again.

  Mildred was still gazing at him with curious fixity. Once she had his eyes back she let her own run meaningfully down toward his scuffed boots.

  He nodded, slow and slight, a motion that would be lost to anybody not studying him a lot more closely than anybody but Mildred Wyeth seemed to be in the general jouncing and jostling induced by the truck banging along across the desert. The frisking he and the others had gotten had been professional but cursory. The sec men were looking for weapons. It didn’t occur to them that J.B. might have a full lock pick kit concealed on his person, much less a couple of odds and ends, including more picks and mebbe a weapon or two; and never in a thousand years would they suspect what might be hidden in, say, a hollowed-out boot heel.

  Then J.B. shrugged. “Don’t see we got much choice but to take the cards as we’re dealt them,” he said, “than play them as they lay.”

  She frowned.

  “With Ryan dead—”

  “Ryan not dead,” Jak said firmly.

  J.B. looked at him sharply. The albino youth patted himself on the solar plexus. “Feel here if was.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense, Jak,” J.B. said with quiet determination.

  Jak’s eyes lit up in anger. “Listen—”

  “Take it easy, you two,” Mildred said. “We got to stick together right now.”

  The traveler sitting to Mildred’s right cocked his head. “What about that bitch of Cawdor’s?”

  Mildred’s elbow jabbed hard into the traveler’s ribs. Air oofed out of him. “Oh, sorry, Seymour. You just take it easy now. And remember it’s not good to speak ill of the dead.”

  He glared at her and rubbed his side. He said no more, though.

  A woman toward the front of the wag had gotten agitated. “So that’s just it?” she demanded. “We just let them shoot down our friends and loved ones and scarf us up as slaves, and that’s it? End of story?”

  “You got a better idea, Maisy?” asked a heavy black-bearded man in coveralls patched in variety of colors.

  The woman gazed wildly around at her fellow captives.

  “They got the drop on us,” J.B. said, loudly but very controlled. “And that’s all there is to it. Spilled blood can’t go back in the body.”

  The woman at Maisy’s side took her arm and whispered urgently in her ear. The hard-bitten guard tipped up his scattergun until it
s foreshortened muzzle pointed at the nowovercast skies. He didn’t say anything, didn’t even change expression. But the implication was clear.

  There would be no more conversation out of the captives. Not because of any silly rules, but because they were getting themselves all stirred up, talking. If they got too stirred up, it would make more work for him.

  That wouldn’t happen. And even though the shot-column didn’t spread out any too quick even from a barrel that short, the odds were pretty good that whoever the coldheart picked as designated troublemaker wouldn’t be the only one to cop some .33-caliber double-aught balls.

  The captives clammed up. But J.B. thought he heard Jak mutter, deep down in his throat, “Ryan not dead.”

  HEAD DOWN, back bowed beneath the weight of the pack she carried, Krysty trudged toward the lowering sun.

  She had begun to feel, not hope—never hope, never again—but a kind of lessened futility. Lessened immediate futility anyway.

  It wasn’t her nature to analyze. Her conscious mind had been nothing but a bright blur for the past several hours. But she was far from stupe, and her subconscious kept working.

  The raiders were well organized and even smart by sec men standards, let alone coldheart ones. The massacre hadn’t been sadistic butchery. It hadn’t even been casual. It had been businesslike. Whoever the murderers were, they were professional about it.

  Their behavior was at the other end of the world from the wild irrationality most coldhearts displayed. Calculating.

  They had been happy enough to take what loot the caravan wags offered, but they dumped the contents of the two wags they needed to transport their own people in without hesitation or question, including provisions they themselves used every day—food, water and ammo. It wasn’t so much that they spurned those items as that they didn’t even trouble to look for them, even though all were present and all reasonably expected to be. The only cargo they kept was spare fuel stored in the vehicles, and that the wags themselves obviously required.

  Far from worrying about their own resupply, they had taken on two dozen extra mouths. Krysty knew why even without the sergeant having grumbled to his superior: the raiders needed slave workers. To do what, she wasn’t sure—something about a track—and didn’t particularly care. What was potentially useful to know was that the raiders hadn’t been concerned even though those same consumables were necessary to keep the captives alive so they could do the work the raiders needed done. Gaia, even ammo, if some of the captives needed extra persuading. And it was through neither inexperience nor the shit-for-brains slavery to the impulse of the moment that controlled most coldhearts, and mutie marauders too, for that matter.